F8 vs F9

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 14:08:00 -0500,
  Arthur Pemberton <pemboa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Lyvim Xaphir <knightmerc at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 09:42 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> >> On Tuesday 12 August 2008 15:50, Lyvim Xaphir wrote:
> >> > If you have ATI, F8 is the only way to go.  F9 is not good for ATI
> >> > cards, the ati drivers won't support any x server greater than 1.4.2.
> >>
> >> I presume you mean for accelerated desktop effects?  Certainly for 'normal'
> >> use there is no problem.
> >
> > "Normal" is folks who want to get the money out of their hardware as
> > opposed to a GNU cultist that's willing to accept substandard behavior
> > in the driver
> 
> 
> You casually call them cultist, but you feel comfortable using their software?

At least some of the ATI cards do get accelerated graphics in F9 using the
drivers that come with Fedora. I have an r530 based card that works. It may not
use all of the features of the card, but glxgears suggests that it works
reasonably well.
If anything, people with ATI cards should be trying F9 first and falling back
only if they have problems and require 3D acceleration features.